Electronic appliances and devices are used in an increasing amount and variety of applications. In addition, consumer devices increasingly interwork with other devices and to enable such interworking an increased desire has arisen for communication between devices, such as e.g. personal consumer devices. For example, the advent of personal computational devices, such as smartphones, has led to a consumer's personal device being used with a variety of other devices to provide an enhanced user experience. As a specific example, a smartphone may communicate with e.g. an advanced electrical toothbrush to download usage data for presentation to the user on the display of the smartphone.
In many such applications, the communication may be achieved through the use of very short range communication links. Specifically, a communication standard known as Near Field Communication (NFC) has been developed. NFC is designed to provide very short range communication between devices. The communication may be a master/slave configuration, or may in many scenarios and embodiments be a peer-to-peer communication. NFC allows a relatively high data rate.
NFC is unlike other wireless connectivity standards in that it is only able to transfer data when within a very close proximity of another NFC device (typically less than 10 cm, and with only a few centimeters distance for most efficient communications). The data may be exchanged at a data rate of up to 424 kbits/s. This provides a number of distinct advantages over conventional data communication approaches, including:
Intuitive connections to other devices as the act of bringing devices together not only enables the connection but also makes it clear which two devices are connected. Increased security and privacy as the other connected device must be in close proximity.
Transferring data to an external computational device, which may e.g. have suitable means for providing a user interface (especially a large display), may result in improved user interaction.
For example, for a tooth brush it may enable a record of brushing activity to be kept externally, and may provide an opportunity for analysis and motivation to improve brushing.
Smartphones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and benefits from familiar user interfaces and an excellent connectivity to the outside world. Increasingly, these devices are becoming a part of users' daily routine and people increasingly keep them close to hand at all times.
Enabling devices such as smartphones and toothbrushes with a short range communication functionality, such as NFC, enables them to communicate with each other when brought into close contact. This enables the phone to act as a computing resource controlled by an application that can e.g. monitor the external device. For example, for a toothbrush brushing performance can be evaluated, brushing targets can be set, customized feedback and coaching can be provided to the user etc. Such functionality may be enabled by the physical act of the user bringing the phone and toothbrush together, resulting in the tooth brushing application automatically being initialized and thus appearing as an application on the phone. The application can then analyze the brushing data and display results.
The use of extreme short range communications, such as NFC, to establish a communication link between two devices provides for practicality and a user interaction which is particularly suitable for many consumer applications. In particular, in the consumer segment, the approach allows for a simple and intuitive operation for coupling devices together. The user simply brings the two devices into sufficiently close contact with each other and this action allows the communication link to be automatically established. For example, in order to download brushing data from an electrical toothbrush to a smartphone, all the user needs to do is touch the toothbrush and smartphone together.
However, due to the extreme short range of communication technologies such as NFC, it is required that devices are brought together correctly and typically the quality of, and in some cases the ability to establish, a communication link is highly dependent on how the devices are brought together. For example, turning a toothbrush the wrong way may degrade the communication link substantially as a less than ideal coupling between the devices is established.
However, providing detailed instructions to users on how to specifically bring the devices together in order to optimize the communication link is often inconvenient and impractical and will be perceived by the user to be a complex and cumbersome operation. Therefore, in many cases the resulting communication link is suboptimal or indeed in many scenarios, no communication link is established due to the devices not being brought properly together, even if they e.g. are brought into contact with each other. In many scenarios, a suboptimal user experience is achieved with the user finding the operation inconvenient and difficult.
Hence, an improved approach would be advantageous and in particular an approach which facilitates the establishment of short range communication links, provides an improved trade-off between user convenience and communication quality and/or reliability, provides facilitated operation, provides increased flexibility and/or provides improved performance would be advantageous.